TUNA LIFE (33 page)

Andrew only made it to Runaway Bay before the Tesla’s battery gauge finally made good on the threats it had been throwing for the last few weeks. The electric engine gave up in the middle of a roundabout.

Andrew swore as he exited the car.

It had truly been a shitty week.

Just how shitty, he would soon know.

69

The emergency capital raising was finalised the next day. Andrew and Ken had brought their own lawyer to the sign-off meeting, and when the lawyer had given his nod of approval, both Ken and Andrew had felt better about the transaction. If any, Ken had been the most negative. He still felt a share issue wasn’t strictly required, and had accused Roman of rushing the process. He wanted more time, more time to peruse the documents, more time to consider his options and maybe ask his father for an advance on his inheritance. Instead he had ended up in almost the same situation as Andrew. Andrew had borrowed a million, and Ken eight hundred thousand. It couldn’t be good to owe Roman that much money, they both thought as they signed the papers. But sign they did.

Andrew had seemed more concerned about being sidelined, and ousted as CEO, than borrowing money from Roman. He had been genuinely worried that he was about to receive the Roman-treatment, but his lawyer’s assurance that the deal was good, and the fact that Roman had personally lent him the money, gave him confidence that his job was still safe.

Andrew also noticed a new trait with Ken, a trait he had never before noticed. Ken seemed like he was always alert, like he didn’t trust Roman. Ken always used to be the laid-back one, the one who never cared about anything. Now the roles had been reversed.

They hadn’t had many alternatives though. It was an undeniable fact that the company needed cash, and with the deal, everything remained unchanged. Status quo was maintained.

The only external investor, if you counted Roman as one of the co-founders, something he had started to insist on, hadn’t even bothered to send a representative to the signing. They had so much faith in Tuna Life that they had just wired the money. As long as they maintained their shareholding they were happy.

There wasn’t any time for celebration though, not even when the funds hit the account. They had managed to secure funding for some time forward, extended the runway as the phrase went, but gone were the days when they were a small start-up. Tuna Life now employed forty-five staff, they rented expensive premises and had their own chef. And every time one of their users uploaded a picture of a piece of clothing, it cost Tuna Life money. Not much, but when you multiplied it by thirty million active users, it soon became a decent amount. The reality was that they had become a large company with massive fixed costs. Talent acquisition and retention didn’t come cheap, and they couldn’t afford to be stingy. They had to spend money to fuel the growth, and then they could always start cutting back once the growth stalled. At the moment they were printing money. And they had to keep their foot on the pedal because the market valued every new customer at more than a hundred times the cost of acquiring that customer. It was insane. They were virtually printing money. Paper money.

And then they had this big fire to put out: The Tuna Life app had without warning started to take pictures and shoot videos of thousands of its unsuspecting users.

The problem with the Tuna Life app disappeared almost as fast as it had come about, though. As soon as the share emission was finalised, the company stopped receiving complaints. There were still a lot of rumours on the internet, speculations about what had really transpired, and there had been a rather dramatic drop in downloads. But the number of uninstalls was surprisingly low. It appeared as if the Tuna Life users were awaiting some official statement from Andrew before deciding whether to uninstall the app or not.

And the official statement turned out to be something Andrew hadn’t seen coming.

“We have to let you go, Andrew.”

“Are you fucking kidding me? No way. No way.”

“This is not a negotiation, Andrew,” Richard continued. “The press release has already been prepared. It’s ready to go.”

“But why?”

“You can’t continue, Andrew. You promised, on live TV of all things, to revert the user agreements back to what they were. You promised we would never access our users’ devices without their knowledge. They’ve been replaying your conversation with Horne on every bloody radio and TV channel the last twenty-four hours. You broke a promise, Andrew. There’s no way back from that.”

“But it was an accident. There was a glitch in our software. People will understand.”

“Somebody has to take responsibility, Andrew. That’s how the world works. You stepping down is the only thing that can save Tuna Life. And don’t forget, you’ll still be a multimillionaire the day we do our IPO.”

Andrew wasn’t so certain of that. He had just borrowed money from Roman to avoid getting diluted in the crisis-emission. A million fucking dollars. If he left Tuna Life now he would have no control of what happened in the company going forward. Before he knew it, he could find himself removed as a shareholder. Screwed like Frank Geitner. Maybe it was karma? Andrew hadn’t objected too much when Roman fucked Frank.

“What if I refuse? What if I refuse to step down?”

“Then you will be sacked, Andrew. You can leave on good terms, or you can leave on bad terms. The end result will be the same.”

“Try, Try to fucking fire me!” Andrew spat out, before storming out of Richard’s office.

“Don’t need to. You managed that all by yourself,” Richard said to himself after Andrew had slammed the door shut.

Richard looked down at the press release he had prepared earlier in the day. They needed a scapegoat, and Andrew happened to be the perfect one. He had never had a management position before being appointed CEO of Tuna Life, he had no background in technology, and he had been lying about his background in all of his interviews. He had made it all up. Nothing of what he had been telling the public had been true.

He was a phony.

A phony and a fraud.

And now, now Tuna Life’s board was taking decisive action and sacking him.

Part 3

70

MONTH 7

NUMBER OF EMPLOYEES: 90

NUMBER OF USERS: 60M

VALUATION: $1 BILLION

Andrew was drooping in his car, at the parking lot outside the Easy-T Shopping Centre in Robina. He had just been to Aldi, the German discount supermarket, to pick up some groceries. He was amazed how quickly it had all happened. A few weeks back he had been dining at the finest restaurants on the Gold Coast. Now he had to resort to a frozen pizza from the supermarket. Not any supermarket, either. It was Aldi, the discount one. Woolies and Coles were outside his budget at the moment.

He had received two hundred thousand dollars when Tuna Life raised money from external investors. Now he risked not being able to pay his tax bill for next year. He wasn’t stupid; he knew that Roman somehow would be able to acquire his shares for nickels and dimes. Roman had insisted on including a right to convert his personal loan to Andrew into Tuna Life shares if Andrew ever was found guilty of fraud or serious negligence as CEO of the company. Andrew had, within hours of being sacked, sought out his lawyer. But at the lawyer’s office he had received the surprise of a lifetime. The lawyer was now working full-time for Roman. A cold shiver had run down Andrew’s spine when he realised that the lawyer he and Ken had used for advice, most likely had been Roman’s man all along.

Andrew had been played. And he hadn’t even seen it coming.

Perhaps it was deserved, he thought.

Karma.

Andrew had done the same to Frank.

But where had all the money disappeared? How had he managed to spend all that money in such a short amount of time? It was like crazy-Mike-Tyson-spending.

The truth was that he had stopped worrying. Throughout his life he had always worried about money, worried that there wouldn’t be enough to pay the bills, worried that the bank would move in and take over his apartment if he lost his job. He had always just made enough to keep his head a few centimetres above the water. One month’s salary as a buffer. Always one month away from being broke. And then Roman had given him an envelope filled with cash. And then two hundred thousand had been deposited straight into his account. And then Richard had told him his shares were worth seventy-five million. To spend five thousand on a night out clubbing didn’t seem like such a stretch when you knew you were good for almost a hundred million. Andrew’s largest expense hadn’t been partying though. It had been investing. Poor investing. After Andrew had been declared an A-celebrity in the tech community, and a C-celebrity in the rest of the population, every dumbass with a half-baked idea had approached him. And Andrew had willingly handed out money. It had worked well in the beginning. The fact that Andrew invested in a company was enough for it to have its moment in the sun. It would get publicity, and the publicity would attract new investors at ever higher valuations. Andrew’s investments had tripled in a matter of months. But then of course the bubble had burst. The companies he had invested in weren’t like Tuna Life, they were dead ducks. None of them made money, none of them even had any good idea of how to ever make money, and they would all soon run out of cash. The next time they raised funds from investors, Andrew would be out – diluted into obscurity.

Andrew turned the ignition key in his old Mazda 3. He had left the Tesla at home. For some reason it refused to start. Well, it wouldn’t have to start for a while. Tesla hadn’t yet opened any service centres in Australia. They didn’t even plan to launch the car until a full year away. And there was no way Andrew would bring the Tesla to his local mechanic, the retired Mazda guy who got stressed if he had to do something more advanced than changing oil filters. The Tesla needed someone with a fucking computer science background, not a mechanic. The freaking thing was an iPhone on wheels.

Andrew’s phone rang. For a brief moment he just stared at the vibrating phone. The Samsung. The smartphone that had been at the centre of this short adventure of his.

The smartphone.

Mobile apps.

Andrew still used the Tuna Life logo as his wallpaper, even though he had stopped using the app the day he got fired. The problems with the cameras turning on had disappeared almost as fast as they had appeared. It was beyond suspicious. Andrew was now certain that it had all been orchestrated by Roman. That Roman was the man behind the virus in the Tuna Life software. That it had all been part of an elaborate plan to get rid of Andrew.

Roman Bezhrev now owned more than half of the company. On paper Andrew still had his shareholding intact, but he knew that wouldn’t last. He couldn’t possibly envision either Ken or he keeping any of their shares. Somehow, in some way, Ken and Andrew would become minority shareholders – they had after all borrowed money from the devil himself – and then they would soon be out of the of the company.

Just like Frank.

Screwed.

And Andrew’s personal problems weren’t limited to the loss of his shares. He had become the official scapegoat for what had happened with the Tuna Life users’ cameras.

Roman and Richard had ‘accidentally’ discovered that Andrew had been checking the IP addresses of several users, users who had experienced the camera problem several weeks before the mass breakout. Andrew had known about the problem, but neglected to inform the board. Instead he had promised on live TV that Tuna Life would change its user agreements, and ensure that its users’ privacy was a high priority. He had done nothing, of course.

His celebrity friends had vanished, almost faster than his money. His model girlfriend, Mira Jones, had very publicly dumped him, telling Who Magazine that it was impossible to maintain a long-distance relationship as she mostly worked in LA. The long-distance thing had never been an issue when Andrew was hot, but now it was apparently a deal-breaker. She had already found a new beau, a promising actor from New York. Media hadn’t been waiting around to draw comparisons. Andrew Engels, it turned out, had also been an actor; the accountant who fooled the tech industry. They had interviewed old friends and colleagues. The picture that arose was not the same as the one Andrew had been selling. The successful entrepreneur, the visionary CEO, the risk-taker who conquered mountain tops and jumped out of airplanes in his spare time: It had all been a charade. Old colleagues spoke of an introvert accountant who enjoyed small gatherings. Friends told about an active young kid who enjoyed sport. But all this extreme sport, that was something new. That had to be something he had started with after founding Tuna Life. He had never jumped in a parachute, never conquered a summit, never done any of those things before he started Tuna Life.

It turned out he hadn’t done much of those things after he started Tuna Life, either. The pictures of Andrew, jumping out of an airplane with a parachute on his back, had been part of a well-orchestrated media strategy for the Tuna Life CEO. The picture had been made in Photoshop, and the only summit Andrew had ever conquered, was more of a steep hill than a mountain.

The media had had a field day with all the lies. The lie of how he had come up with the Tuna Life name, the lie of how he had come up with the idea for the company. The deeper the journalists dug, the muddier it got. Nothing was as Andrew had told them.

Andrew picked up the vibrating phone.

Unknown number.

He pondered what to do. It was most likely another journalist, some underpaid fuckwit who got off on pushing Andrew further down in the mud.

He answered anyway.

“Andrew, can you hear me?”

Andrew recognised the voice immediately.

It was Frank Geitner.

71

Scott Davis didn’t mind the interior at Crazy Kangaroo Strip Club. Truth be told, he almost felt part of the interior. This was the fourth time he was visiting in a matter of a few months. He deliberately avoided the female bartender with the eagle tattoo on her back. He didn’t want to cause her any unnecessary trouble by asking about Marissa or any of the other missing girls.